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Best Buy’s gradual disappearance took a predictable next step today, as the company reported disappointing earnings and announced a new series of desperation moves to find something to hold onto even as it sinks deeper into quicksand.

As part of yet another restructuring plan, the company intends to close fifty of its big box stores and fire an additional 400 corporate staff. (Best Buy currently operates 2,900 retail locations worldwide.)

The need for the closings is obvious. Today’s final report card for last year’s financial performance included several failing grades. Revenue at established stores fell 2.4% last year, following a 4.7% decline in the previous year. Overall, the company lost $1.23 billion last year, or $3.36 per share.

Readers of my earlier posts on cascading problems at the electronics superstore won’t be surprised to hear any of this. Nearly three months after a post-Christmas nightmare at my local Best Buy led me to conclude the company was in the early stages of going out of business, I still hear every day from customers, employees, and former executives with new horror stories.

(Just read through the comments from readers on the two posts, especially those from Best Buy executives cluelessly trying to explain that it’s the fault of uncooperative customers their “business model” isn’t working out.)

Deploying the New Killer Apps

Over the last three years, the industry experienced little innovation [in] many of the large traditional consumer electronics categories such as television, PCs and gaming. At the same time, consumers have enjoyed greater price transparency and ease of costs shopping. As a result, we knew we had to accelerate our cost reduction efforts, adjust our sales mix and significantly improve on the experience we were delivering for our customers. All of this in the most uncertain consumer and economic environment we've ever experienced.

But the real problem for Best Buy, as with other traditional retailers, is not that customers now know too much to take advantage of them. It’s not dwindling margins on TVs, computers, and mobile devices. It’s not that some online retailers don’t collect state sales tax, or have more forgiving return policies. It’s something much simpler.

Over the last fifteen years, each and every competitive advantage the big box stores had over other forms of retail has been systematically eroded or turned against them. Best Buy, like many retailers, is struggling not with any particular competitor or channel. They are competing with a perfect storm of disruptive technologies that have made buying, servicing, and using consumer electronics as different from a decade ago as they were during the time of Thomas Edison.

To name just a few, high-speed mobile broadband, cloud computing, tablet devices and the modular nature of app stores have utterly changed not only which products consumers buy, but how they shop for them, upgrade them, service them, and replace them.

Ironically, the culprits here are some of the very same technological innovations that Best Buy sells. In some sense, they’re arming their enemies, and giving them far better weapons than they keep for themselves.

These technologies are the foundation for a new generation of killer apps, a platform that extends vertically and horizontally in unpredictable directions but at accelerating speeds.

That’s what retailers and other incumbent industries are competing with. Some existing companies have embraced these innovations, and are using them to improve their competitive position. Others, well, not so much.